Physician at forefront of Ebola fight: “Ultimate award” is what you get back from survivors

When Lassa fever, a cousin of Ebola, was afflicting hundreds of thousands of people in West Africa in the late 90s, Daniel Bausch, MD, MPH & TM, worked with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Guinea to set up a laboratory for study and testing of the rodent-borne disease. Unfortunately, the lab lost its international funding in 2003, as it could have proven useful in preventing the Ebola epidemic, which began in a remote village in Guinea just a few hours away, Bausch told a Stanford audience last week.

“I think back that if we had succeeded in keeping this lab going, how different it would have been if we’d been able to just send a sample down the road,” instead of losing valuable time in shipping the samples to Europe for testing, said Bausch, the keynote speaker at a day-long global health conference.

Today, Bausch, an associate professor at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, is at the forefront of the Ebola fight, treating patients at an Ebola clinic in Sierra Leone that he helped establish and training and recruiting other clinicians. He is also consulting with the World Health Organization in the development and implementation of treatment guidelines and drug and vaccine testing for the disease.

In 1996, Bausch was working with the CDC in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where dozens of miners were being felled by a strange set of symptoms. The source was identified as Marburg virus, a cousin of Ebola that kills more than 80 percent of victims. While the usual course of spread is from one person to the next, these miners were harboring different variants of the virus, suggesting multiple sources, he said. The disease was traced back to the caves where miners unearthed their gold and where they were exposed to bats — the likely reservoir of the virus, Bausch said. He and colleagues published an article on their Marburg investigation in 2006 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Because of his rare expertise with hemorrhagic fevers, Bausch was called upon early on to help fight in the latest Ebola outbreak, working alongside West African colleagues in Guinea and Sierra Leone who died of the disease. He said one bright spot in the epidemic is the speed with which scientists have moved forward in developing new treatments and potential vaccines. “In the last six months, we’ve seen a process that’s unprecedented, with accelerated science and the launch of clinical trials that would normally take years,” he said.

And he said he cherishes the experience of seeing patients who have successfully fought off the disease. He showed a photo of a colleague, draped in white protective gear, alongside a young survivor: a smiling boy in striped pants who had lost his father to Ebola.

“That is the ultimate reward… It means something to you – what you get back from (the survivors),” he said.

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